Simple Southern Lifestyle. Complicated Twenty-Something Year Old.

The risk of falling too hard into a niche:

We love our niches. We’ve been told to seek them out since we were kids. Find your people and everything else will fall together! And I’m not saying that our people aren’t important, in fact, they are one of the most important things in our lives. All I’m saying is that we don’t want all our people to be exactly the same, just like we don’t want all our creative work to be the same, or all our habits to stay exactly the same.

We’re human beings, we don’t make progress or grow if we just do the same things over and over again.

If you find people who are too much like you, or only enjoy work that is exactly like the work you create, you’re not going to change any. You’re not going to be pushed to grow, you’ve never going to need to step outside of your comfort zone. You’ll create a beautiful little bubble around you and you’ll never be challenged. It might sound nice in a lot of ways, but without being challenged we will never achieve more than we are now. Without being pushed outside our comfort zone we’ll never learn that we do better work there. We’ll never learn that our people weren’t helping us but holding us back. We’ll never know that we can be more.

That doesn’t mean we need to get rid of our comfort zone. It doesn’t mean that you should stop hanging out with people who are just like you or enjoying work that is similar to our own. That would be foolish advice. We like our niche, that’s how it became ours in the first place. I’m not saying we should lose it, but rather have more than one, or even just explore outside of it from time to time.

You should have friends in our life that aren’t anything like your other friends. You should have books on your shelves that aren’t anything like the rest. We should be challenging ourselves to step outside of what’s comfortable from time to time, because there is really amazing things out there. Sometimes it’s better than the stuff that is in our niche, sometimes it’s not, sometimes we can take those things and bring them into our niche and make them our own. But we need them. We need the break in routine to make us know whether we should have that routine to begin with. We should have friends that make us evaluate what kind of people are in our life and have hobbies that push us to develop skills that we have left undeveloped.

Our niches are beautiful and comfortable, we’re supposed to feel at home there, but we’re also made to venture out and make home elsewhere. You’ll enjoy what all you can find.